Useful stitcher commandline arguments for timelapse

For now, please contact us and we'll help you stitch your timelapse gigapan. For those interested in what's going on under the hood, or interested to experiment with stitching themselves, here are new commandline flags that support timelapse stitching:

Compensating for automatic exposure

If lighting might change between frames, but a human isn't present for each capture, we recommend setting the camera for automatic exposure (we like aperture priority, with an overriding adjustment to bring down the exposure 1/2-1 stops to reduce saturation).

The newest stitcher can read exposure from EXIF information on each input image and adjust brightness of the individual images to match exposure across an individual frame. The feature cannot yet be used at the same time as automatic vignetting correction, so you have to turn off VC in order to use the feature:

--load-camera-response-curve path-to-response-curve: Use camera response curve for equalizing exposure. Required. Many cameras are similar; we've successfully used the Canon G10 response (filename g10.response) for the Canon G9 for example (attached).

--adjust-exposure EV: After adjusting overall exposure to average of input exposures, adjust entire image by this many stops (floating point). Use a positive number to make brighter and negative to make darger; e.g. to make image half a stop brighter use --adjust-exposure 0.5.

Aligning to other panoramas

--master: master.gigapan: Align this panorama to master.gigapan and crop the stitched image to line up pixel-to-pixel with master.gigapan. This flag may be repeated to align to multiple master gigapans.